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Selley: I write these words on Dalton McGuinty Day — Family Day as the rest of y’all call it. It’s the holiday Premier Dad offered us in the middle of an election campaign, having kiboshed a private member’s bill to the same effect some months earlier, thus proving how easily bought we really are and how utterly ridiculous McGuinty’s good-governance-gee-shucks-earnest act really was. Where was I going with this? Oh, right, booze. On McGuinty Day, you cannot buy booze to take home, because that would be ridiculous. Well, you can buy booze to take home: At a Wine Rack or a brew pub, or over the Manitoba or Quebec or U.S. border if you live near enough, or at a rural convenience store authorized by the LCBO to sell booze even though Kathleen Wynne thinks it’s dangerous to allow convenience stores to sell booze, but certainly not at an LCBO or Beer Store in Toronto, because, again, that would be ridiculous. The Beer Store having recently renewed hostilities with the Ontario Convenience Stores Association with a highly dubious study about the perils of retail liberalization, I hereby open the floor: Assuming (please say yes) you consider the liquor retail status quo insupportably bizarre and inconvenient, how would you like to see it changed?

Gurney: When I was going to school in Waterloo, I was a reasonable drive from the Sleeman Brewery in Guelph. Cream Ale by the kegs, fellas. Not what I miss most about student life, but it makes the list, believe me. But I’m a responsible adult now, with a job and a kid, which means two things: 1. My consumption of beer and any other alcohol is way, way down; 2. My government believes it has a social responsibility to protect me from myself by directly controlling how much alcohol it sells me. To be clear, it doesn’t ever hesitate to sell it to me, nor does the private-sector Beer Store, in any quantity that I may desire. It’s just very important that the status quo be preserved, because just imagine if … well, I actually can’t really see a problem. It’s insane. Right now, the grocery store my wife and I frequent is conveniently co-located in a plaza that also contains an LCBO and a Beer Store. Now, let’s put on our imagining caps for a minute, guys, and picture how cool it would be if I could buy my beer and wine at that very same grocery store, instead of 300 metres away, from a different building. It’s insulting the the government thinks I can’t be trusted to control my own drinking, but I somehow find it even more insulting that they think that putting all the booze in a building on the other side of the parking lot is somehow “socially responsible.”

Goldsbie: The Globe’s Adam Radwanski once tweeted about the LCBO that, “in practice, it’s somewhat defensible. In principle, it’s not.” Eye Weekly once held it up as a model for the TTC, an example of a public agency that successfully gave itself a top-to-bottom overhaul to put customers’ interests first. It’s greatly expanded its selections of beer and spirits over the last five years, responding to customer demand for more obscure and interesting products. The worst that can be said about the LCBO, on the level of “practice,” is that its locations are sometimes out of the way and its hours are occasionally inconvenient (particularly Sundays and holidays). That is to say, it’s successfully muted talk of revolution by being fairly good at what it does. And you can sort of see the logic behind it, however tenuous it might be. The private-monopoly Beer Store, on the other hand, is as indefensibly anachronistic as Ontario’s publicly funded Catholic school system. It’s a freak of history that benefits a concentration of powerful interests whose key argument for maintaining the status quo concerns the preservation of some kind of ill-defined moral clarity. I find it hard to get terribly worked up over the LCBO while The Beer Store, with its uniquely privileged position, is still a thing that exists.

Selley: I suppose a straight-up government monopoly on liquor sales, such as several provinces run, makes a bit more sense than Ontario’s … uh … let’s call it a hybrid approach. But if anything I’m more offended by the quasi-monopoly that’s run by the government than by the one that’s run by the three foreign mega-brewers. Because that’s nothing less than proof of concept: The private sector can safely and profitably sell alcohol. Now if only we would allow it to do so conveniently, we’d be in business. Alas, that remains unthinkable.

Tobacco, which government hates way more than booze, is conveniently sold all over the place, at all hours, by private operators to anyone over 19

Gurney: It’s funny, when you think about it, that I could actually get cigarettes more conveniently and with greater ease than I can booze. Moot point in my case as I’ve never smoked. But tobacco, which government hates way more than booze, is conveniently sold all over the place, at all hours, by private operators to anyone over 19. A case of beer, for that same 19 year old, is a much greater hassle. Weird kind of social responsibility, eh?

Goldsbie: I’d argue that the risk of impaired driving renders alcohol’s potential dangers more immediate than those of tobacco, but it’s a fair enough point. The question, really, isn’t whether the current system makes sense. (It doesn’t.) Nor is it whether there are viable alternatives on the table. (There are.) The intractable quandary is why politicians are so deeply reluctant to address the issue. At least with, say, Catholic schools, you can understand that there are well-organized voter constituencies that would rebel at any notion of reform, and timid politicians who would rather not raise their ire. What are the implicit threats keeping the dominant liquor order in place?